“I’m leaving for a business trip,” Igor said, kissing me quickly as he grabbed his heavy travel bag.
I didn’t answer. I just stood by the window, looking at the new high-rise across from our building. The distance between the two buildings was about fifty meters. On the eighth floor, a bright light was on, and a woman in a house robe was slowly stroking her huge, heavily pregnant belly.
From the hallway, Igor called out that the taxi was waiting around the corner, then slammed the front door behind him.
I stepped closer to the glass.
Seven minutes later, my husband appeared in the window across the courtyard, wearing the same blue shirt I knew so well. He walked up to that other woman and wrapped his arms around her from behind like he belonged there.
My hands began to tremble from the nausea rising in my throat. I sank onto a stool in the dark kitchen and laughed out loud at my own stupidity.
Seven years of marriage.
For the last four years, I had carried our entire life on my shoulders while Igor was supposedly building his innovative startup.
Investors were difficult. Projects kept getting delayed. He kept asking me to be patient a little longer.
And I was patient.
I took extra twenty-four-hour shifts at the clinic. I worked sixty hours a week so we could pay forty-five thousand rubles toward our mortgage on time. I wore the same mid-season boots for the third year in a row and searched supermarket shelves for yellow discount tags.
Only now did I understand that the main and only investor in his business had been me.
And while I was doing all that, my husband was building a second family.
Right across the courtyard.
With a perfect panoramic view of the wife who was paying for the whole celebration.
The next morning, I opened our old home tablet. Igor had used it to search for tickets and had forgotten to log out of his banking app.
We had never gone through each other’s phones, but this time the screen itself helpfully lit up with the transaction history.
Something inside me snapped.
Hidden inside his profile was a secret virtual card. I scrolled through the statements from the last two years and nearly choked with outrage.
Weekly transfers to someone named Alina. Regular food delivery payments to the address in the building across from ours. Purchases from premium baby stores.
Two hundred and eighty thousand rubles had gone toward another woman’s comfort in the last six months alone.
And the one hundred and twenty thousand he had begged from me a week earlier for “server rental” had gone to an Italian stroller boutique.
He had not simply cheated on me.
He had built a cozy little nest for another woman’s child with my money.
On Sunday evening, my “business traveler” returned from his so-called trip to Samara.
“How was the flight?” I asked evenly.
“I’m completely exhausted,” he sighed theatrically, tossing his bag onto the hallway ottoman. “The investors are dragging their feet again. Anya, can you transfer me thirty thousand? I urgently need to pay some contractors.”
I looked at his things.
His bag smelled strongly of expensive lavender laundry softener, and his fresh shirt was perfectly ironed. Trains don’t smell like that. And apparently, his contractors urgently needed new baby rompers.
I transferred the money without saying a word.
I needed time to prepare.
Two weeks later, the investors once again called him away. This time, he was supposedly going to Yekaterinburg for five whole days.
“It’s a very important meeting,” Igor said, adjusting his tie in front of the mirror and giving me a guilty smile. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, darling.”
He left.
I immediately went to the windowsill.
Exactly ten minutes later, the light came on in the apartment across the courtyard, and my husband wrapped his arms around his Alina with the same familiar ease.
I went to the storage closet and pulled out a roll of the thickest trash bags I could find.
Into them went his expensive wool suits, the ones bought with my bonuses. Then came the designer shoes, the watches, the collection of ties, and his beloved coffee machine.
By the time I was done, I had eight heavy black bags.
I dragged them down to the first-floor landing.
Then I opened my phone and went into the shared chat for our residential complex. Nearly five hundred people from three neighboring courtyards were in it.
I took two photos using maximum zoom.
In the first one, Igor was standing in our window.
In the second one, the same Igor was embracing Alina in the window across the courtyard.
The camera quality was good enough to show their happy faces in painful detail.
I attached the photos and typed quickly.
“Dear neighbors from buildings twelve and fourteen. My husband Igor is currently in apartment forty-five of building fourteen. He forgot his belongings before his final move. I have left them in trash bags near the first entrance. If anyone knows Alina, please tell her to come collect her man’s dowry. And while you’re at it, give her the good news: the businessman is completely bankrupt. The car loan is in my name, and tomorrow I’m taking the car back.”
I hit send.
Within a minute, the chat exploded.
Messages started flying in, one after another — shocked emojis, forwarded screenshots, questions, gasps of disbelief.
Ten minutes later, someone began pounding furiously on my door.
“Anya! Open this door right now!” Igor’s voice cracked into a hysterical shriek.
I walked up to the door but didn’t touch the lock.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted so loudly the whole stairwell could hear him. “Why did you have to do this in front of everyone? Alina is crying! She feels sick! Her blood pressure is jumping!”
“Call her a private ambulance. But this time, pay for it yourself,” I answered loudly and clearly through the metal door. “Leave the car keys in my mailbox, or I’ll report it stolen.”
He kept kicking and banging for another ten minutes.
Then the awakened neighbors on our floor intervened, and my now former husband ran away in disgrace.
A month has passed.
Igor is living with his mother in her tiny one-room apartment.
Alina threw him out that very same evening, once she fully understood that her promising IT genius didn’t have a single ruble to his name, and that the stroller would have to be returned to the store.
We are already finalizing the divorce through court. I sold the car last week.
His relatives and our mutual acquaintances keep blowing up my phone.
They call me a vindictive witch. They say I had no right to drag such filth into public view. They write that I acted cruelly and could have harmed a pregnant woman’s health with my brutal stunt in the building chat.
But for the first time in four years, I sleep peacefully.
And I spend my salary only on myself.
Did I go too far with that public humiliation in the building chat?
Or was I right to throw him out onto the street without a single coin?
